


the savage glitter

by Eddaic



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self Harm, Sexual Content, mature themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 16:26:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11763810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eddaic/pseuds/Eddaic
Summary: It would be nice to wake up like this every morning, to make believe that he is wanted.





	the savage glitter

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ‘The Quick and the Dead’ by Joy Williams, though it doesn’t fit the original context.
> 
> I had TOS in mind when I wrote this, but it could also fit AOS.

**the savage glitter**

When Leonard is six, he decides he wants to marry the pomegranate tree in their backyard.

He tells his mother he has to be in love with it, because he spends so much of his time outside school sitting in its shade and watching the sunlight glinting off its waxy fruits. When he climbs it, his fingers feel sure and his legs strong, and he likes the way the sweat drips from his hair into his eyes. He’s never been injured beyond a couple of light scrapes on his palms and knees, so the tree must like him.

“Husband and wife are good to each other, and I’m good to the tree. I water her and I don’t pull off the leaves,” he says, grasping his mother’s hand, soft and a tad powdery like the skin of a floured dumpling, while she shakes with silent laughter.

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate such a handsome man,” his mother says, smoothing back his dirty, windblown hair.

Leonard frowns. He had never considered the need to be handsome. There is a heaviness to his chest, a lightness to his head. He rummages for a word, can’t find one. He’s not sad and he’s not cross, though he's still both.

But his mother is smiling, so he supposes it is an ideal thing to be a handsome husband.

***

Leonard can put up mental barriers to block out sound – a useful tool for studying – yet they seem to be malfunctioning now. He props himself against a wall and stares at the ceiling; the paint is yellowed and peeling. His legs feel like sacks of sand.

“I don’t like his face,” Adam is saying sulkily. He is on the other side of the wall, inside the classroom, and Leonard cannot see him but he can picture the curl of his lip. Leonard has always taken pains to tiptoe around Adam; sometimes he turns heel and takes a different, longer route to his destination.

Fatima is kinder, somewhat. “Don’t be so mean. He didn’t make it himself.”

“I don’t care who made it; I don’t like looking at it.”

“Adam,” Fatima says in a schoolteacher voice, “sometimes I’m ashamed to be your pal.”

Leonard supposes he should be grateful. He pulls himself straight and begins to trundle home, tripping over what seems to be every stone and crack on the pavement as the sun beats down on his back. The walk stretches longer than usual. When he gets through the front door he considers crying, but boys don’t cry. Then he considers asking his father if there is something wrong with his face, but boys don’t ask things like that.

Dazed, he flops onto his bed and begins reading on his tablet. Two sentences in, he stops. Do boys read? He vaguely remembers a classmate insisting that only sissies read. If you’re a sissy, Leonard thinks, you can’t be a boy. He puts down his tablet and frowns. Boys like…what do they like? Building blocks. Dirt. Knives. Sports – real sports, like soccer and boxing.

Boys like pain, too. They’re proud of it. The boys at Leonard’s school have cuts and bruises parading around their elbows and knees. Leonard must be lagging behind; his hands are not callused and his only trappings are a couple of faded scars on his shin.

He rolls off the bed and walks to his desk. Notebooks. Pencil shavings. Pens, pencils, scissors lolling in a mug with a dinosaur pattern. A rather ordinary desk for a twelve-year-old. Leonard eyes the scissors before plucking them from the mug, running a finger along the blades.

A dig here, a nick there. It couldn’t hurt too much; most boys would be used to far worse.

***

“The others have them.”

“And?” his mother prods evenly. After the bout of shouting (Leonard knows she shouts because she loves him), she had slipped into her usual patience. She dabs at the jagged wounds on his forearm with antiseptic, and he grits his teeth so he does not flinch.

“I want…” He trails off, uncertain. What does he want? Cuts and scrapes. Blood. Tearing leaves off trees for no reason but to tear them. “I want to be a boy,” he finishes lamely, not knowing what else to say.

“Dear Lord above,” exclaims his mother, not without kindness. “Why’re you full of such foolishness today?”

Leonard begins to avoid mirrors. He takes down the one opposite his bed in his room, doesn’t look at his reflection in the bathroom when he brushes his teeth or combs his hair. Each time he accidentally does, he quickly looks away. 

When he begins to shave, he trains himself to focus only on slicing away the protruding hairs. It takes a while before he realises he does not know what his face, moulded by adolescence, looks like.

It makes no difference. Of course it makes no difference. He has carved a place for himself as an honour student, and has vowed to be a doctor like his parents.

Things like faces are silly to think about; it is a good thing that he keeps away from his reflection.

***

Leonard is fifteen when he helps his father cut down the pomegranate tree. There had been no choice; the termites had eaten right through it, leaving it hollow and brittle. They hack and chop briskly, and the limbs hit the ground with dull thuds. Leonard's palms are blistered and rubbed raw, and he feels blessed for the pain that drapes the folds of manhood over his shoulders.

He is rueful that his mother will not be able to pick fruits off it, and that he will not be able to nap under it between study sessions. But he does not feel upset about the tree.

It is just its functions he will miss, that is all.

***

By the time he is in his second year of college, he barely has enough energy to cook himself a meal at the end of the day and drag himself to bed. There is no time to worry about mud and scissors and trees. This, Leonard thinks fuzzily one afternoon in the middle of a study session, is for the best.

Childish things should be left in childhood.

***

He likes Jocelyn well enough, and they are friends (and successful marriages are based on friendship). More than anything else, it is the right thing to do. So he puts his hand over her shaking fingers and smiles as comfortingly as he can, even though there is bile in his throat and his insides are churning.

He is not yet finished with his residency, but he is old enough to be a father.  _I had better be_ , he thinks fiercely to himself.

***

The marriage is as he expected. Bland, with occasional flares of fun, occasional pricks of bitterness. Joyful, always, with Joanna.

Leonard does not think he can keep all the happiness inside his skin. When Joanna toddles up to him he picks her up, plants her in his lap. He pushes back her dark curls, kisses her anxiously wrinkled forehead. He clicks his fingers in front of her round eyes, marvelling at how she shrieks with laughter and claps her pudgy little hands.  

“Jocelyn, look! She’s laughing. See? She laughs when I do this.” He's stupid, he realises, blinking. He is so stupid with love. Grinning so big his face hurts, he rolls onto his back on the fuzzy carpet, allowing Joanna to loll on his stomach, and thinks even God couldn't be this lucky.

Sometimes Leonard sits in the big overstuffed couch in the living room and thinks,  _Am I in love and just don’t know it?_  Mostly, he shrugs it off. He has witnessed soured relationships. Yelling. Hitting. He is relieved that neither he nor Jocelyn would stoop to that. They get along, don’t resent each other. There is nothing to complain of.

He comes home one evening from work to find Jocelyn slouched at the dining table. She tells him she’s leaving and she wants Joanna.

Leonard should shout. Argue. Demand an explanation. There’s static in his ears and the room is turning slowly. He finds himself saying, “Do you have a place to stay?”

For three days everything feels sluggish, unreal. He keeps waiting to crumble. Other men drink themselves to oblivion, smash plates against walls, go to bars and pick up women. Leonard stumbles between the hours. He trudges to the hospital, slogs through his shift, and somehow gets himself back home, swaying from lack of sleep. On the fourth morning he pours himself coffee and looks blankly into the cup. Joanna will probably start drinking coffee in college.

He starts crying halfway into his first sip. It is the kind of crying no one would dare show in the movies: long, high whines, more animal than human, mucous dribbling from his nose. He can’t even be glad no one is there to see it.  

***

Leonard does not know where the next ten years go. He doesn’t care. His parents are dead and he has no friends. He knows he is thin, almost gaunt, but most food tastes like cardboard to him. He eats so he has enough energy to work, and no more, and drinks to help himself sleep.

On days when he is numb, when it feels like his mind is a backwater, he takes a scalpel and makes a slit in his leg. The pain helps him remember he is alive. There is a little ladder of white scars running up his inner thigh, like cuts on wood marking a growing child. He considers consulting a psychiatrist –

_Boys don’t do such things._

_Boys like pain._

– but he is probably overreacting. If he cannot plant both his feet on the ground, that is his own fault.

Sometimes, he meets Joanna, and he tries to make things enjoyable for her. The first time he kisses her temple, she leans away, so he doesn’t do it again. He wishes he could hold her in his lap, toss her into the air before she gets too heavy, the way other fathers do.

As the years pass he sees her less and less. On the occasions she visits him, she spends most of her time reading or watching holographic television. When they are together, baking, talking, or playing games, she is courteous the way one is to nameless people walking down the street. It is because he is an inadequate father. He had always imagined (wished) that Joanna would be a daddy’s girl, but he supposes it would be an insult to her to be fond of him.

It becomes a struggle to even glance at her. His thoughts snag on the corners of his self-disgust and he sees what all he failed to give her. Then he feels guilty because he shouldn’t be using his daughter to sink further into himself. She does not deserve that.

His head swims.

***

Leonard looks to the stars and keeps looking at them. There is no one to tell him to stop, no obligation to pull him away from the window.

He dislikes the idea of going to space. Humans are not meant to fly, let alone whiz across galaxies in enclosed metal discs. He gets up and looks at himself in the oblong mirror in the living room, touching his cheeks, tracing the high curve of his eyebrow with his finger.

It feels like he is staring out from an unrecognisable body, with startling bright eyes and a mouth wreathed by fine lines, and it takes a while for it to settle that it is his – his own to move and feed and do with as he pleases. Tentatively, he finger-combs his hair (it is soft and downy; he had never taken the time to feel, really feel his hair), so it looks less like a muss and more like a dignified cut.

Leonard raises a hand to strike himself, feels silly, drops it.

Surely, he thinks, the unfortunate folks up in space would appreciate a good doctor.

***

He does not want or expect to make friends.

Leonard teaches Jim to play poker. Jim teaches him to play chess. After Leonard loses his third game, he laughs. "Find another partner; I’m not playing with you again. What, were you the national chess champion?"

"I never competed professionally," says Jim, grinning. "My mother, however, won three international titles. She even qualified for intergalactic games." He is puffed with pride, his skin almost glowing.

Leonard smiles and says, "I used to accompany my parents to bars sometimes over the weekends. Learnt poker from these grand old ladies who always occupied the same table in a corner. They used to go through whiskey like water. Had the sharpest tongues I've ever heard, too." 

"I don't doubt it."

"They were very kind, though."

"Must have been, to put up with an underage brat."

Leonard lightly raps the side of Jim’s head with his PADD. “I’ll have none of your cheek, young man.”

“But you will have dinner with me tomorrow." There it is, that look, with the glittering eyes and arched brows, the self-assured grin that splits his rounded cheeks. He’s like one of those stars from old, over-the-top 20th-century movies; you can almost see the glitz and notes of music in the air around him.

Leonard is sure Jim is the type of man who leaves behind a lover in every city. A nomadic, irresponsible thing, free with his affections, even if grave and stony-faced while working. Leonard is not young enough to believe in promises from such men, but he is willing to thaw his toes in the warmth of one-night-stands.

***

In the morning Leonard wakes to Jim kissing the back of his neck and holding him tightly, like he’s made of paper and will fly away with a bit of breeze. Beneath the duvet it is almost hot and sweat clings to his throat, but he does not move. It would be nice to wake up like this every morning, to make believe that he is wanted. He closes his eyes and basks in the sensations, aware that he will not feel them again. 

“All right, scat, kid,” he says good-naturedly later on, after they have finished breakfast. (Jim had downed two mugs of hot chocolate while Leonard valiantly endeavoured to finish half of his.) Jim leans against the doorframe and grins at him. He gives Leonard a long, playful look before tipping his head down (almost in the mock-respectful way someone would tip a hat) and turning his heel. Leonard tries not to feel disappointed. After he shuts his door he goes to his desk and begins to study, turning his thoughts away from the creases around Jim’s smile.

Jim turns up later that evening. Leonard is in the middle of cooking dinner and greets him with bewilderment, wiping his damp hands on his apron. He wants to say,  _What are you doing here?_  but thinks it would be rude, so he watches Jim putter around the kitchen, lifting the lids off pots and pans and sticking his nose in the biscuit jar.

“Are you all right?” he says at length, when Jim shows no signs that he will leave.

Jim pours them both glasses of water and sets them on the kitchen table, and Leonard vacillates between annoyance and pity. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m gonna be straight with you," says Leonard, sliding into a chair and steepling his fingers. "I’m not going to act like your fallback because you can’t find someone else to warm your bed. I’m too old for this.” He had expected indignation, shock, perhaps rage. The hurt on Jim’s face strikes him, and he is too taken aback to feel remorseful.

“What are you saying, Bones?” Jim says, sounding wretched.

“Don’t be cruel, Jim,” sighs Leonard, rubbing his brow with a hand and ignoring Jim’s tone. “Don’t call me that.” The first time Jim had used the nickname, Leonard had said, affronted, As in  _sawbones_? and Jim had replied, Referring to how skinny you are, but that works, too.

“No, Bones,” Jim insists, shaking his head, “you’re not my fallback. I don’t think of you like that.”

“Don’t go around dirtying your tongue with lies.”

“It’s no lie.”

Leonard sticks his knuckles into his eyes, exhausted.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” continues Jim, “if that’s going to convince you.”

“Oh, Jim,” says Leonard gently, as if addressing a wayward child, “it will take a lot more than that.”

At 4.30 am Leonard finds himself sleepily answering the door. It is only after he opens it that he realises he has carried his pillow with him like a teddy, and shifts it behind his back half-heartedly. Jim stands there, his hands pink and chapped from the cold, wringing his striped scarf as if it is dripping wet. “I have to report for P.T. now," he announces, "so I can’t stay, but I’ll come back again, if you’re willing.”

“You’re out of your corn-fed mind,” says Leonard, smiling despite himself. Even if he cannot believe Jim cares for him, he is endeared. “Come in and let me make you some coffee.”

“No, sir,” says Jim, scowling and stubborn. “I have to go now. But I’ll see you later.”

Leonard is left blinking, staring at Jim’s broad, receding back. “Don’t call me ‘sir’,” he murmurs to the air.

***

They end up on the same starship.

Leonard should have expected it; Jim can be both pushy and wily, and as the youngest person to captain a ship from Starfleet, obviously pulled some strings.

“Rank hath its privileges,” says Jim, as he clinks his glass of brandy against Leonard’s.

Leonard takes a sip. “Don’t you know it.”

“It’s a hit with the ladies, too,” continues Jim, his grin indicating he is trying to get a reaction from Leonard.

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Don’t worry,” says Jim, putting down his brandy and walking forward till he is right in Leonard’s personal space. He runs his fingers over the skin of Leonard’s wrist before prying the glass out of his hand and keeping it aside. “I know this upstanding Southern gentleman who keeps me in check.”

“I’d say he’s doing a rather miserable job.”

Jim kisses him, pressing him against the wall and twining their fingers together. He’s got on a strong cologne and Leonard almost pushes him away because it gives him a headache, but he takes all this as part of celebrations.

Jim's hands run down Leonard's sides, rest questioningly at his waistband. Leonard is stiff with anxiety, but he is tired of the words lying heavy beneath his tongue, so he lets Jim undo the button.

Leonard has never before taken off his trousers in front of Jim. Over the years, when they lay together, he insisted on having the lights off. At times Jim grew irritable (mostly at Leonard’s refusal to explain himself), but he never pushed. 

“What are these?” says Jim, kneeling down and running the tips of his fingers delicately over the scars, as if he is afraid they are fresh and still smart.

Leonard sees no sense in lying at this point, and there is not a believable lie he can create about it. “I cut myself.” He is surprised at how level, how impassive his tone is; that Vulcan science officer, what’s his name, would approve.

There is a beat. “…Deliberately?” Jim’s voice is tight, but not with anger.

“Hard to get wounds like that by accident.”

“Why did you do this?” 

Leonard had meant to say something concise, cold, offhand, but finds the words falling out of his mouth. “It was the easiest way of grounding myself, reminding myself I was real – that the world was real. I didn’t do it for some twisted form of penance, or because I hated myself.” Perhaps a lie had unwittingly bled into his confession. He does not vocalise this, because Jim has enough to chew on, and Jim in any case thinks too much, is a danger to himself.

Jim says hesitantly, “Do you still…”

“No.”

“Did you talk to a counsellor?”

“No. And I probably won’t talk now.”

Jim slides his hands over Leonard’s thighs, soothing. “Bones,” he says, “I can’t force you to see someone. But…if there are vestiges of whatever you felt back then – ”

“There are. But they’re few and pale, so I’ll take care of it.”

“Was it about the marriage? Or something else, from childhood, as well?”

“By God, Jim, you’re not a psych.”

“There’s gotta be some reason you didn’t take care of yourself.”

“Jim” says Leonard firmly, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

Jim gives him a pained look, but murmurs, “All right,” and presses a kiss to inside of Leonard’s thigh. After a moment he says, “Did I ever tell you how handsome you are?”

Leonard snorts. “You did. And I’m well past seventeen. I don’t need your body-positivity pep talks.”

Jim gives him a look that says he does not quite believe him, but it is gone swiftly. “Can’t I at least vocalise that I find you nice to look at?” he replies with a mock-frown.

Leonard laughs then. “Go on.” He spreads his arms. “Shower me with odes and sonnets. Or don’t,” he adds when Jim opens his mouth. “You can probably quote all of Shakespeare backwards and I don’t need that kind of drama.”

***

A fortnight later, in the cafeteria, Jim crowds next to Leonard, their elbows bumping. (It had been awkward talking to Jim about how the meetings with the counsellor had gone, but eventually it had eased into normalcy.) Spock joins them across the table; of late he has taken to hovering about Jim and even Leonard, threading his deep, soft voice into their conversations.

Leonard works a bite off his sandwich, savours the salt of the melted cheese, the sweetness of the sauce; it is as though he is eating, not just nourishing himself, after a long time. He feels light, but not in that numb, sickly manner he had grown so accustomed to. This is a warm lightness and it tastes of contentment.

Spock makes a drab comment about the illogic of consuming meat, and Jim squawks like an indignant crow before launching into an argument, brandishing his plastic fork.

Leonard looks at them with something dangerously close to fondness, and does not hide his smile.

_-finis-_


End file.
